I am thinking about doing a press release for one of my sites. I see Prweb minimum upgrade fee is $30, but it says somewhere $200 is better. Most press release sites I checked all seems pretty much the same more or less. Besides that paying $200 will allow you to add keywords to your links and you go higher on their site, what will you gain? Do you gain more traffic and links? Is the difference significant? Anyone who ever sent a press release please share your experience. Thanks
Well, I run a public relations firm, and I regularly distribute press releases for clients. You'll usually get the best coverage from free sources (manually emailing/faxing it to media contacts you have or real newswires like AP). But if you're going to use general distribution sites like PRweb, the difference is where you place in their listings more than anything else. It will give you live links, but that's not the point of a press release and should be one of your last concerns. Some make you upgrade just to get added to Google news and such. But you don't need to. www.PR.com always gets my releases in Google news w/o having to upgrade through PRweb or anyone else. The difference between $30 and $200 can definitely make a difference in views of your release and the pickups. The higher you place in the site's rankings, the more people will see it, which naturally increases the chance they'll click onto the full release and therefore increases the chance you'll be covered. But as with anything in PR, there are no such things as guarantees. You can't guarantee that media are going to care. You might have really huge news. But then a natural disaster might happen hours after you put your release out, and no one cares what you have to say anymore, because in comparison, it's no longer newsworthy. So what you should be worrying about is making sure you have something truly newsworthy in the first place. Distribute manually at least to the biggest places you're hoping to get coverage from, and leave the newswires as more of a backup. That's probably your best bet for coverage. If you really feel you have something serious media will care about, it can be worth the upgrade fees. If you're not quite sure, then don't waste the money. Jenn